Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 75

Use the \V Literal Switch for Verbatim Searches

The special characters used for defining regular expressions are handy when searching for patterns, but they can get in the way if we want to search for text verbatim. Using the verynomagic literal switch, we can cancel out most of the special meanings attached to characters such as ., *, and ?.

Take this excerpt of text:

patterns/excerpt-also-known-as.txt

The N key searches backward...
...the \v pattern switch (a.k.a. very magic search)...

Now suppose that we want to jump to the occurrence of “a.k.a.” (which stands for also known as) by searching for it. The most natural thing to do would be to run this search:

/a.k.a.

But when we press Enter, we’ll find that this pattern matches ...